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War Horse

$200. That’s what it cost me to see War Horse last month. Bus fare, ticket, meals, driver’s tip. I’m reading Shane Claiborne’s The Irresistible Revolution right now, so I’m wincing at the admission. His remarks about consumerist Christians feel up close and personal.

But let me tell you about War Horse. I’ve read the book, seen the movie, but “the play’s the thing.” With minimal staging, we were cleverly ushered into farmyards, village squares and even battlefields. I loved how scythes could become fences simply by turning them over and butting them together, farmers becoming immobile posts. I loved how stringing pennants up into the audience could rope us effortlessly into a celebratory town meeting, the recruiter cajoling us with stirring patriotic rhetoric. “It’ll all be over by Christmas!” he vows. This is the pulse of drama, suggestiveness coupled with imagination, disbelief…